Monthly Archives: December 2010

A FEW DAYS ago, GloFo’s Ian McNaughton has left the high tech world to spend time with his family. While this is normally code for “I got fired before I had a new job lined up”, this is one occasion where we actually believe that he means it.Read more▶

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN OPENING presents and the post-Christmas eggnog hangover, we had the opportunity to tour the Micron DRAM and Flash memory fabrication facility in Manassas, Virginia. While a fab is a fab and the net result, like anywhere else, is a groovy 300mm platter of chips that you cannot eat, we’ll walk you through Micron’s production process, profile the company, and give you a bit of insight into the challenges it faces and its opportunities in the near future and years to come.Read more▶

SAMSUNG HAVE BEEN pushing its AMOLED display technology pretty hard, in fact the company has gained so much popularity that it can produce enough of its smaller displays that go into smartphones. At CES Samsung is set to show off several new AMOLED displays, including a flexible 4.5-inch model and a pair of larger qFHD transparent prototypes.Read more▶

INTEL’S SANDY BRIDGE is days away from launch, but the big news this week is the massive changes to the next generation Ivy Bridge. If Intel manages to get their drivers in order, it could destroy the entire low end GPU market.Read more▶

REMEMBER HOW EVERYONE applauded Nvidia’s Optimus graphics switching technology? Well, it seems like there’s a new sheriff in town, as LucidLogix has just announced its brand new dynamic graphics switching solution called Virtu, which is all done in software and which will work with any discrete GPU, not just Nvidia’s.Read more▶

WE EXPECTED A FEW Brazos boards at launch, but it seems like we might end up seeing more than just a few which is good news for AMD if nothing else. ASRock is readying a board of its own called the E350M1 giving away both the CPU and chipset being used and it’s said to be a low cost solution, but it appears that ASRock might be offering a few different SKUs.Read more▶

WE HAVE TO start by apologizing for the poor picture that we snapped of this board, as unlike the Big Bang Marshal board, MSI didn’t have the P67A-GD80 on display in the same fashion. Well, that’s not quite true, as there was a system with a board in it, but thanks to a large shiny heatsink and a large graphics card combined with poor lighting, we didn’t manage to get a good shot of the board.Read more▶

ALTHOUGH WE’RE STILL about a week away from the official launch, MSI was showing off a pair of Brazos solutions earlier today at an event in Taipei, Taiwan and while maybe not mind blowing out of a design perspective, it’s at least a step in the right direction. On display was a 12-inch notebook as well as a 20-inch all-in-one desktop, both featuring an AMD E-350 CPU.Read more▶

AS OF LATELY, MSI has gained a bit of fame with the graphics card overclocking community largely thanks to its N480GTX Lightning and we can now offer you a sneak peek at what MSI has coming next, namely the R6970 Lightning and N580GTX Lightning. Both boards use a much larger PCB than you normally get on a graphics card, akin to the N480GTX Lightning, but MSI has come up with a new cooling solution called Twin Frozr III which aesthetically looks much better than the older card.
Updated: December 29, 2010Read more▶

WHAT DO YOU do as a motherboard manufacturer when you have to come up with a flagship product that is unlike anything your competitors have? Well, in the case of MSI you create the Big Bang Marshal, a monster of a board that features no less than eight x16 PCI Express slots in an XL-ATX form factor.Read more▶

TRUST ME WHEN I say that things catching on fire, like your laptop while you are in bed, are much funnier when they happen to someone else. I say trust me because my Sony Vaio laptop did catch fire while I was in bed about a week ago.Read more▶

AMD, OR RATHER ATI have in the past had a few claims to fame thanks to its easily “soft moddable” graphics cards and it seems like the company has just scored itself another popular card with those brave enough to flash their graphics card BIOS. The Radeon HD 6950 as it turns out is quite easily turned into a Radeon HD 6970 and it can save you some cash at the same time.Read more▶

PIRACY, AN ISSUE that isn’t easy to resolve and that is currently causing a lot of commotion with the various governments in Europe at the moment, with some countries going as far as imposing bans on individual’s internet connections if they’re caught downloading illegal content. In Sweden an organization called Copyswede handles copy right licensing in most cases and they are suggesting a new “tax” that could be in affect from the 1st of April next year, for all kind of external storage devices.Read more▶

GIGABYTE HAS BEEN extremely secretive about its G1-Killer motherboard which is set to launch at CES alongside its already revealed line of Sandy Bridge compatible motherboards. However, today the company revealed a small sneak peek of what to expect as part of a series of desktop wallpapers and although it doesn’t reveal too much in terms of details, it does give away some interesting features.Read more▶

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Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also a council member with Gerson Lehman Group. FullyAccurate

Thomas Ryan
Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.

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